Older age identities may emerge close in time to when hardship is experienced and persist into young adulthood. Unlike our first measure, feeling like an adult could mean feeling older or not, depending on the age one is. Show the world that you mean business when you choose one of these serious baby names. Instead, he argues, it is the development of adult personal qualities like responsibility that now define adulthood in contemporary Western societies. Scholarship in this tradition tends to move forward from this conceptualization to better understand identity salience, behavioral choice, self-verification, and other aspects of identity processes, with little attention to other bases of identity. Handbook of the Psychology of Aging. With respect to feeling older, the coefficients for — percent of the poverty line and for feeling unsafe were more positive for males than for females; the coefficient for experiencing or witnessing violence was more positive for females than for males. This suggests that these young people age faster, and feel adult earlier, than other young people.